Retirement – Championing the slow lane

We’re a funny country. Up until Christmas we move at a frantic pace, then suddenly shut down and don’t wake up properly till Waitangi Day. Six weeks of hibernation, when news doesn’t matter, except for drownings, murders, landslides, floods and road accidents. President Trump’s latest surprise is treated as background entertainment. The media were running on summertime, after all.

Not that all this matters much to retired people. Slow time is ‘same old, same old’, but it’s nice to watch the rest of the country slacking off. Will things ever get back to full speed? Retired people know that slowing down doesn’t kill you. Lower speed limits on the roads save lives. Taking time to listen more carefully to people pays social dividends. Legislation passed under urgency creates shoddy law-making. Fast food makes for shorter lives.

But by the time this column is published. we’ll be gearing up to full speed mode again and sleepy January will be a distant memory. The breathless pace of media reporting and endless advertising promos has returned. The race to next Christmas is on, only sidetracked by an election en route.
What would happen to the country if we stayed in slow mode? Imagine what a four-day working week would do to the mental health of the nation? Countries that have tried it out report no big drop in productivity, and a happier and healthier work force. The crisis of finding enough counsellors and therapists would ease dramatically. More time to talk to kids who currently rely on Tik Tok for conversations.

The stop-start, boom-bust cycles of Kiwi life are the deeper problem. Our agricultural sector knows about respecting nature’s calendar. Sports teams are learning how to find a rhythm of training that isn’t overwound. Lionesses – the English women’s football team, kicked their way into championship status by balancing hard training with relaxing, playing with Lego and jigsaws.

But the Kiwi economy has yet to learn how to pace itself. Constant urging of faster economic growth doesn’t help. The chorus of calls to work harder, longer hours, set higher targets will increase in this election year. What we have yet to find, as a nation, is a human rhythm that sustains us.

We know we’ve got a problem about that. The health and wellness industries keep warning us to rebalance our life styles, work smarter, exercise more, eat wholesome stuff. The chemist shops are full of diet supplements and natural remedies to counter the bad stuff we swallow. But this too often only serves to delay doing anything about finding a sustainable rhythm to our over cranked life and work patterns.

Will we ever dare to change all that? As more and more Kiwis ease up into retirement mode, maybe the problem will take care of itself. I don’t know many Gold Card holders who suffer from moving too fast.